Two ERC Starting Grant Projects on Different Aspects of Bullying Begin: DWELL and SHADES

Sarah T. Malamut & Tiina Turunen

Last year, we both were awarded 1.5 million euros starting grants from the European Research Council (ERC) for our projects: DWELL and SHADES.

DWELL, led by Sarah T. Malamut, focuses on how young people cope with stressors (such as being bullied) and how support from friends can help or hurt.

SHADES, led by Tiina Turunen, turns the lens toward those who bully, asking what motivates them, how they differ from one another, and what happens to them after their school years.

We are both in the early stages of our projects. Preparations for new data collections and development of measurement instruments are currently ongoing and several new postdoctoral researchers have recently joined our teams.

Although we are leading separate projects with distinct aims, we also believe our projects offer complementary perspectives on how peer relationships are linked to well-being (both in the short- and longer-term).

Picture: Sarah Malamut (left) and Tiina Turunen

DWELL: Understanding How Youth Cope with Peer Victimization

Peer victimization (being the target of aggression or bullying by peers) is widely recognized as a serious risk factor for youth adjustment, with consequences that can extend well into adulthood.

Recent studies highlight rumination (excessively dwelling on one’s distress) as a key factor in prolonged suffering for victimized youth. Despite the belief that seeking social support is beneficial, a surprising paradox has emerged, such that supportive friendships can sometimes worsen distress for victimized youth – perhaps due to dwelling on their experiences with friends (co-rumination).

Co-rumination with friends may help strengthen bonds, or increase feelings of friendship intimacy, but it can also inadvertently reinforce distress by leading to repeated focus and attention on negative experiences and feelings.

However, previous research focused on co-rumination has primarily relied on self-reports assessing individuals’ general tendency to co-ruminate.

DWELL goes beyond this by taking a network perspective and will develop an approach that assesses who co-ruminates with whom.

This approach allows for more thorough understanding of how characteristics of the individual, their co-rumination partner(s), and of their friendship(s) impact the consequences of co-rumination for victimized youth.

Through a multi-method design (longitudinal studies, register data, daily diary, observation), and a novel co-rumination measure, DWELL explains individual differences in day-to-day, short-term (~1 year), and longer-term (up to adulthood) effects of victimization and (co-)rumination on mental health.

DWELL aims to help prevent suffering of victimized youth, but also has far-reaching implications for non-victimized youth who engage in (co-)rumination in response to other stressors.

Picture: Tiina Turunen (left) and Sarah Malamut

SHADES: Heterogeneity in Bullying and its Consequences

Bullying is a widespread problem with significant implications for youth development, even for the perpetrators. Some perpetrators may act out of social motives, others for personal gain, and still others due to underlying difficulties in understanding social interactions.

Some adolescents persist in bullying over time, while others stop when adults intervene or when they notice that their behavior is not kind. Yet, research on consequences of bullying has mostly treated those who bully as a single, uniform group.

This tendency to focus on average effects has left many important questions unanswered about the diversity of young people who engage in bullying, the factors that sustain or reduce such behaviors, and the consequences for perpetrators themselves across the life course.

Understanding this heterogeneity is essential for building more effective theories and interventions that move beyond “one-size-fits-all” approaches to tackling bullying.

SHADES examines the personal characteristics, motives, and social cognitions of different types of youth who bully their peers, and investigates how genetic factors shape individual differences and influence perpetrators’ adjustment later in life.

The project adopts a life-course perspective, asking how different types of school-age bullies adapt in domains such as education, work, relationships, and overall well-being as they transition into adulthood.

The aim is to combine several innovative approaches. Two novel measurement instruments are currently being developed: a mobile-based tool to assess implicit attitudes and motives, and an eye-tracking experiment to capture social-cognitive processes.

In the coming years, new longitudinal data will be collected during adolescence, focusing on both self-reports and peer reports of bullying and wellbeing, as well as experimental measures of cognition and motivation.

These efforts will be complemented by an existing large-scale longitudinal and genetic dataset, which track individuals from childhood through adolescence and into adulthood.

This combination of new and existing data is globally unique, providing an unprecedented opportunity to study bullying at multiple levels of analysis and across developmental stages.

New Perspectives on Peer Relations

Together, DWELL and SHADES let us explore peer relationships from two complementary angles: the perspectives of those who are victimized and those who perpetrate bullying.

By examining both sides of peer difficulties, and the psychological, social, and developmental processes involved, as well as developing and incorporating novel methodologies, we hope to build a fuller picture of how young people navigate challenging peer dynamics.

Over the next five years, our teams will share insights and methods and work to distribute our findings to other researchers, policy makers, and the public.

For now, we are each at the start of our journey, but we are pursuing questions that we believe are essential for better understanding young people’s lives. We’re excited to see where this journey takes us and to share what we discover along the way.

Authors

Tiina Turunen is a Senior Researcher at the INVEST Flagship Research Centre at the University of Turku. Her research interests include antecedents and consequences of bullying perpetration, evaluation and implementation of anti-bullying interventions, bullying among students with learning difficulties, as well as psychosocial well-being of children and adolescents. In 2024, she received the European Research Council’s (ERC) Starting Grant to study heterogeneity in bullying perpetration and its longitudinal effects on adjustment and wellbeing (https://sites.utu.fi/shades/en/).

Sarah Malamut is a University Research Fellow at the INVEST Research Flagship Centre at the University of Turku. Her research focuses on peer relationships, aggression and victimization, and popularity in adolescence, as well as mechanisms that underlie the consequences experienced by victimized youth. In 2024, she received the European Research Council’s (ERC) Starting Grant to study individual differences in the effects of victimization and (co-)rumination on mental health (https://sites.utu.fi/dwell/en/).